Will Your Blog Be Big? Or Great?

This guest post is by Marjorie Clayman of Clayman Advertising.

Recently, it was announced that Richard Thompson was going to be awarded the OBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Your response, in any order, might be, “Who cares?” and “Who is Richard Thompson?”

Richard Thompson has a career in music that spans 40 years. He is a brilliant lyricist, but even more, he may be one of the best living guitarists out there. He was a member of folk rock super group Fairport Convention and he partnered with his ex-wife Linda in the 70s to make some fantastic albums. He wasn’t much of a vocalist back then, but now, even his vocal stylings are outstanding. And yet, Thompson plays small theatres and “intimate” concerts, and has a hard time enticing record labels to keep him on.

Richard Thompson is great, but he is not big.

Big? Or great?

Over the years, at any moment, Richard Thompson probably could have chucked his own particular style and his own particular skills out the window. He could have promised himself and his fans that it was for just one album, so that he could get his name out there. Then he’d come back to being himself.

So it is with blogging. You bring your own particular voice to your blog. You bring your own unique experiences and skills to your readers. But at any moment, you could say that honing your skills is not nearly as important as getting a lot of traffic. It’s so easy to think that aiming for “big” may be better than aiming for “great.”

Let’s face it—it’s probably easier to achieve “big” in comparison to becoming great in this competitive space. Write a few posts attacking big names, offer link bait, be controversial—you’ve seen all of those tricks in action. But are those bloggers great? Will you remember them in 40 years?

Aiming for greatness

If you want to aim for greatness instead of trying to be big, here are some tactics you could try.

• Look at how you can improve. Richard Thompson probably realized that his vocal work needed improvement. Instead of resting on his laurels, he worked hard, and it paid off. Look at your posts from the last month. What would you do to improve each post just a little bit?
• Blog outside your comfort zone. Stretch your limits. Attack new areas that will enrich your experience and that of your readers.
• Look at the content of the comments you receive, not the number. Are people saying that you helped them out or helped them see things in a new perspective, or are they just saying, “nice post”?
• Track your subscribers. Although this can be a metric for size as well, subscribing is an action people take when they are confident every post you write will be of interest to them (though they won’t read every single one). Are people placing that much confidence in you?
• Become a cult classic. While Richard Thompson may not be “big,” his followers are about as loyal as they come. Look at your readers. Do you have people who are not just reading your posts but gushing about them to their followers and their community?

You can be big and great

This is not to say that everyone has to be like Richard Thompson, toiling away in the genius room while only the Queen of England cares. But becoming “big” is often a function of elements that are out of your control.

If folk rock had really become popular, Richard Thompson might well have become king of the world. The Beatles became as big as they did in part because they caught a new sound just as it was growing.

But aiming for great? That’s entirely under your control. It is defined by you, it is measured by you, and it is something you do from the heart. It’s important to remember that greatness can help pave the way for getting big. Getting big does not promise greatness.

Have you been concentrating on getting big lately or have you been working on honing your craft? Which do you value more? I’d love to discuss it with you in the comments section.

Marjorie Clayman is Director of Client Development at Clayman Advertising, a full service marketing communications firm located in Akron, OH.

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5 Tips for Better Results with Mobile Email Marketing

Picture this scene.

A reader of your blog and a loyal subscriber gets a new mobile device.

No problem: You’ve taken great care to make your site mobile friendly.

You’ve even taken the right steps to convert more mobile readers to your email list.

So you feel pretty confident that all your bases are covered.

Until your subscriber gets her first email from your latest marketing campaign. It’s all squished up on the screen, it’s impossible to click on any of the links, and the message overall is terribly hard to read.

Your loyal reader really wants to get the benefit of your great content. So she spends some time fumbling around trying to make sense of it.

But eventually frustration wins. She gives up and hit the red “delete” key.

Think this doesn’t happen? It sure does. I’ve seen it, more than once.

Mobile email marketing design is smoking hot. If you can manage to make sure your mobile readers are satisfied with those subscriber-based emails, then you have covered what may be the largest of your readership. And here are some tips to help you out.

1. Include a plain text version of every message

Including a plain text copy of every HTML message you send will help eliminate potential issues for those subscribers with mobile readers that do not support HTML.

Any good email marketing service lets you include a plain text version, make sure you’re using it.

2. Keep links uncrowded

If your email message has links that you want your readers to click on, such as navigation back to your main site (recommended), then make sure those links stand out on their own.

In other words, keep them uncrowded so it’s easy to click them within a very small space.

Imagine your loyal reader flicking around on a tiny screen to get to that link — and how frustrated you get when the links are so close together that you can’t land on the one you want. If you want clicks, make it easy.

3. Pull the reader in with your subject line

Hop on over and read Brian’s article on the three key elements of irresistible email subject lines.

Now … actually use those three key elements for your email marketing messages.

Like any headline, an email subject line has to capture attention quickly and drive the reader to click through.

By the way, the current best practice for subject lines for mobile devices is to keep it within 5 words. That’s right, you have about 5 words to grab the attention of your reader. Why? Because after about 5-7 words, the subject line gets truncated and thus it’s a lost opportunity.

4. Use the right tags for your images

If your email marketing message includes images, make sure you include an alternative (alt) tag to describe what the image is. (You should be doing this for any HTML content you create — mobile readers aren’t the only users who may not be able to see your images.)

Don’t stuff this tag full of keywords, it doesn’t work. Use it for what it was meant for — to briefly describe what the image is, in a way that lets your reader make sense of it if the image isn’t visible.

Many devices can display all your images correctly, but not all of them will, so it’s just smart to use alternative text to make sure every reader gets the message that image was supposed to convey.

5. Is your call to action clear?

People using mobile devices spend a little less time taking in the content due to the smaller screen sizes and the fact that they are usually on the go, so make sure your email marketing has a clear call to action.

Put it either near the beginning or somewhere where it will stand out. Don’t make it hard to find … after all, it’s the key to getting the response you want.

Last thoughts

You might be wondering how to know what your email message will look like on all these devices. Just because it looks great on an iPhone doesn’t mean it won’t be mangled on a Blackberry. There are some great simulators out there that let you see how things will appear on the various devices. A Google search for “mobile device simulator” will give you lots of options.

Whatever email marketing service you use, spend some time in settings area and explore the various options they have for delivery. Now that you have some tips to keep in mind, you never know what options they have that you just didn’t see before.

How about you — what experiences have you had with mobile devices and email marketing?

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You Have a Niche! You Just Don’t Know It Yet

This guest post is by Heather Eigler of HomeToHeather.com

Yes, you do have a niche. You’ve likely read it a thousand times on blogs about blogging. Two of the number one pieces of advice are ‘choose your niche wisely’ and ‘write what you know.’

So what if you aren’t wise and don’t know anything? What could you write about that qualifies as a niche? And what does having a niche do for you anyway?

Having a niche has its benefits

Your niche gives you focus. It gives you identity and purpose. A blog with no niche is like a magazine with no cover model. The model on the cover of a magazine tells readers instinctively what they are likely to find on the interior pages. A fashion model indicates articles about celebrities and shopping can be found inside. An athlete tells us we can likely learn how to improve our golf swing.

The same goes for blogs. A niche is our version of a cover model. We include it in our headers, our buttons, our posts and our SEO. Readers who land on our page will instinctively know what the blog is about—if we’ve done our jobs well.

There are blogs about food and blogs about cameras. Blogs about travel and blogs about sports. But what if you just write about your everyday life? What if there is no core subject matter and your blog is a grab bag of this and that.

What can you do then?

You have a pre-made, bona fide, built in niche

Yes, you do! It’s your location. Everyone lives somewhere. And there are other people who live where you do who might be searching for information on local events or restaurant reviews. And there are many people who don’t live where you do who might be interested in visiting someday … but how would they know if they can’t come across anything on the web that tells them what a great place it is?

When I rebranded my site, HomeToHeather.com, to be more of a personal blog, I knew that I was going to have issue expanding my readership because of my content—it’s a mom blog. Only so many people are going to want to read about my kids
and they certainly aren’t going to surf in from search engines to do so. Yes, I write about other things, too—like blogging and products.

I’ve had a small bit of success with traffic from StumbleUpon but not enough to keep the site growing. Since I live in a fairly large, dynamic city I decided that incorporating a local slant could be my niche. So I started incorporating a few posts here and there about Calgary. I added my city to my title tags and banner. Then I sat back and watched my stats to see if anyone arrived via search.

And they did.

What topics can you take local on your blog? How about:

• events
• restaurants
• parks
• wildlife
• sports
• local celebrities
• local schools, clubs, and associations
• tourist info.

If they’re talking about it, they’re Googling it

What’s going on right now that people are talking about? Read through your paper and write a post on the opposite view on a major topic. What are people talking about at work? Write about it.

I get a smattering of Google traffic every day for phrases such as Calgary Daycare, Calgary Blog or Calgary mom blog. I’ve attended a few events as a “local blogger” and have had one or two advertising inquiries from local
businesses. The new local focus is working and I’m excited about what’s next for me.

While HomeToHeather is still a small blog—very small, I am slowly working my way towards establishing a local readership, with local content. It’s a great way to round out the rest of my more random posts about blogging, motherhood and creativity. So try it yourself and take advantage of your built in niche—you never know where it will take you.

Have you done any local posts on your blog? Could this technique work for you? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Heather lives, parents and blogs in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Grab her rss feed for more posts on local blogging.

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Making Money Playing Poker?

If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know I love playing poker and playing at DK's Poker tournaments that are held at all the industry events.

This last affiliate summit I got completely owned. I mean, I did really poorly. Bad cards, bad plays, etc. I blame the fact that I was really tired (ok, I am making that up).

I was asking friends for tips and tricks when I found out my friend Neil Patel and his buddy Mike Kam launched their own Poker blog, Online Poker Low Down, with tips and tricks on becoming a poker pro.

It's actually got some really great content so I figured that I would share it with those of you who also like playing poker and could use that extra advantage next time around.

Looking more into the site, it's all about making a living playing poker, which is a pretty interesting concept. Regardless of whether you want to make it your living, it's got great tips on bluffing, learning good strategies, etc. He even has a free ebook on learning to play heads up poker that was really good too.

If you're into learning how to play a better game,

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When Passion and Complacency Collide: Tips to Get Out of the Funk

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Complacency Kills

Have you lost the passion for writing and blogging? Maybe you’ve been doing it awhile and don’t feel the same drive as you did when you first started. Sometimes we start out passionate about a topic, but that passion can turn into complacency and later lead to lethargy.

Before we get into some tips to either keep your passion alive or revive a lost passion let’s cover the definition of these terms.

The dictionary defines complacency as:

a feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger, defect, or the like; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation, condition, etc.

If you’ve ever been on a construction site you may have seen signs that read, “Complacency Kills.” What this means is that by getting too comfortable with your daily routine you often make mistakes. In the construction business these mistakes can be deadly. Complacency in your blogging or online business may not physically harm anyone, but it can lead to death—death of your business.

The dictionary defines passion as:

any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate.

You love blogging, you love your business, but sometimes the passion just isn’t there, especially if you’ve been doing it for a long time. Maybe you still go through the motions but your content often reflects how passionate you are. Maybe it’s gotten dull and boring to your readers. A lack of passion for your business can lead to lethargy—which is death in itself.

The dictionary defines lethargy as:

the quality or state of being drowsy and dull, listless and unenergetic, or indifferent and lazy; apathetic or sluggish inactivity.

Once you reach that stage in this cycle it may seem impossible to ever get your passion back. These tips will help you to avoid reaching the lethargic stage and may help you pull out of the funk if you’ve already reached it.

1. Take a break. You can either take some time away from your work completely or if you’re running a blog do fewer posts each week. If you blog daily, make an announcement that you’ll only be blogging two or three times per week.

If you feel the need to completely walk away for awhile, look at tips 2 and 3 to keep your blog updated with new content.

2. Hire a writer. If your budget, allows you can hire a writer to write a couple of posts each week. This will give you more time to kick back or to work on traffic and promotions instead of writing all the time.

3. Ask for guest bloggers. Having people guest blog for you is an excellent way to free up some of your writing time, add fresh content while maintaining a good posting schedule and it also helps someone else gain exposure to their blog as well as yours.

4. Spin. I don’t mean spin class. I’m talking about reinventing yourself or your brand. Get creative and make it exciting again. Add a little twist to your current brand.

5. Support Team. Create your own support team – surround yourself with only positive, supportive people, in an environment that fosters creativity – like a forum or social network. Offer your help to those people. Sometimes focusing on helping someone else come up with creative ideas will also spark your own ideas about your own business.

Prevention is always the best choice when you feel yourself waning from having passion about your blog and business. No matter how passionate you may be, you can still lose your excitement. If you’re aware this is happening, just take some of the steps above to prevent becoming lethargic about it. Outsource some of your work if you can or need to. Get involved with like minded people and draw inspiration from their passion. Do something! Even if you need to take a few weeks off, do it. You can set your blog to auto-post while you’re away.

Things can keep running smoothly even when you need a break.

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Time Management for Travel Bloggers … and Others

This guest post is written by Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site.

While I hate the name, I am, to some degree, a digital nomad. I spend my time traveling the world and working as I go. By that very definition, I’m a digital nomad. But unlike most other digital nomads, I don’t move to a city for a few months, live and work there. I run a travel blog so I’m constantly on the move. In fact, my life would be a lot easier if I stayed in one place. That’s why the issue of time management is so important to me.

Balancing life and travel is a hard task when you’re constantly being pulled outside for activities, while the demands of running your own business keep you inside.

As a traveler who makes a living by building and publishing travel websites, I’ve found that the web can be all-consuming: it’s easy to spend hours or even days online. There’s always work to be done. The Internet will take as much as you give it. Conversely, it’s easy to get off track and “play” too much. Meeting new people and traveling to new destinations often becomes more important than work. It was hard for me to strike a good balance between the two for some time. I worked too much and I traveled too much, so something always suffered.

Meshing travel and work into a manageable and fulfilling lifestyle is an art. If you are going to have a travel blog, you are going to eventually need to travel and blog at the same time. A some point you’re going to need to find a way to balance work and travel if you want to be a successful travel blogger.

Time management involves a lot of trial and error, and I have had to learn how to balance conflicting demands. I’ve been pulled in many different directions, and it has taken a lot of discipline to balance my work and life. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over my years of travel is that it’s important to set specific times for work. You have to force yourself away from the computer, otherwise “a few more minutes” can easily turn into a few more hours. Over the years, though, I’ve developed a few strategies that help others manage their time more efficiently on the road.

Check email once a day

It’s easy to get distracted by incoming email. I increase my productivity by scheduling specific times to check my email. Nothing is ever so urgent that it can’t wait a few hours. If you’re always checking email, you are going to be constantly distracted and not as productive as you could be.

Know when you are productive

My most productive hours are in the mornings and late afternoons before I go out. That’s when I do my best work. By scheduling work when I’m most productive, I get the most done and then I don’t have to worry about anything else.

Avoid tourist times

This point continues the one above. As a traveler, you want to be out, traveling and doing stuff. You don’t want to be working all day. Avoiding work during the day is important. Museums, tours, activities—they all occur when the sun is up, and that’s when you should be out too. Working the late afternoon or early morning will still give you time to see the sights.

Set a time limit

I set a time limit for work and tasks. If I force myself into a time constraint then I have to work during that time. It’s a mental trick, but it works. This works even better when you’re traveling with other people. You don’t want to make them wait!

Create a task list

It can be easy to get into work or forget about important tasks. I find that creating a list of tasks helps me to focus my efforts and increase my productivity. I like to break the list up into daily tasks. Once I finish a day’s work, I go out and play, and I don’t feel like there is still more to do.

Compartmentalize

Another trick I find helpful in balancing the workflow is to create day tasks. For example, Monday is my writing day, Tuesday is photo day, Wednesday is a random task day. By further breaking up the work into more manageable pieces, I spend less time getting stressed out and going, “Oh! I have so much to do!”

Shut off social media

Twitter and Facebook are the most distracting tools ever invented. I love them both and constantly use them, but when I am working I shut them off. If I don’t, I spend too much time chatting with friends on Facebook or reading tweets, and my productivity suffers for it.

Learning to balance work and travel—or blogging and the rest of your life—is a hard task that everyone has to work on. You can better balance work and play, however, by training yourself to lead a disciplined life and by having good time management skills. I didn’t learn these lessons right away, and I’m still not all the way there yet, but I’m getting there. What are your time management secrets? I’d love to hear them!

Matthew Kepnes has been traveling around the world for the past four years. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, AOL’s Wallet Pop, and Yahoo! Finance. He currently writes for AOL Travel and The Huffington Post For more information, you can visit his Facebook page or sign up for his

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5 Fast Tips to Improve Internal Links

This guest post was written by James Hay, Social Media Coordinator for Fasthosts Internet Ltd.

Playing to your strengths is an important part of SEO, and before going out and spending all day endlessly pursuing external links, it is important to look at your own site.

You control what is displayed on your site and the SEO tips below provide a number of ways to increase your rank strength and improve your blog’s internal link architecture.

Just in case you’ve not come across the phrase “Internal Linking” before, here’s a quick definition from SearchPath:

The process whereby words or phrases within a web page are linked to other pages in the site. Internal links are considered important in SEO terms, as they are often spidered and displayed by Google.

So here are my top five tips to help you improve your internal link architecture.

1. Use keyword-relevant anchor text

Ensure that the keyword(s) you’re trying to get ranked for is used as your anchor text (the text within the link). For example, if the phrase you are trying to get ranked for is “Internal Links”, and the page you want people to find for that phrase is your article “Guide to Internal Linking”, then use that phrase as the anchor text for your link. The search engine spiders will then understand what your target page is about, and it will increase the content’s ranking strength for that phrase.

2. Use absolute URLs

Although there is no empirical evidence to say that search engines spiders prefer absolute URLs (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/pagetitle.html) over relative URLs (i.e. /pagetitle.html), it is good practice to use absolute URLs. It help spiders determine exactly where the page is located on your site, and if your content gets copied, then at least the links will point back to your website.

3. Improve your site’s speed

The speed at which your pages load certainly affects your page rank. I recommend using Google Webmaster Tools and adding a sitemap to your blog. You can then look at your site performance and how quickly your pages load. Google seems to regard 1.5 seconds or less as a good load time. Compress any large images and refine unnecessary code to help speed up your site.

4. Use text menus

Although search engines are improving all the time, the search engine spiders still have difficulty crawling non-text navigation menus. It is advisable to use text menus rather than those that require Flash or JavaScript.

5. Clean up your links

It’s important to keep in mind that search engine spiders love to move freely and quickly through your site, which is why I’ve provided the tips above. But one thing that spiders really dislike is hitting a dead-end, and broken links are the cause of this. The Google Webmaster Tools can also identify broken links on your blog. Go through those links and either remove them, or change the anchor text and redirect the link to a valid page.

These are my top tips for improving internal links on your blog. What others can you add?

This article was written by James Hay, Social Media Coordinator at Fasthosts Internet Ltd and the main contributor to the Fasthosts Blog which provides advice on everything from B2B Marketing to Social Networking.

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Excellent Analytics Tips #19: Identify Website Goal Values & Win!

Regular readers of this blog will recognize that I suffer from OOD. Outcomes Obsession Disorder. I am seeing a therapist for it.

The way OOD manifests itself is that in every website and web business I work with I am obnoxiously persistent in helping identify the desired outcomes of the site / business before I ever log into their web analytics data.

The other way OOD manifests itself is that I am in your face, on this blog, constantly asking you to create goals in your web analytics tool (macro and micro conversions) as well as identify goal values for each of those beloved goals.

Without goals and goal values you are not doing web analytics, you are doing web iamwastingyourlifeandminelytics. Sorry, OOD.

After following a structured process to create a Web Analytics Measurement Model most companies find that they are able to identify the goals for their web business.

What they find exceedingly hard to do is identify the economic value added to the business when those goals (micro-conversions) are met.

Framing the Goal Values Challenge, & Opportunity.

Here is an example.

At victoriassecret.com the macro-conversion is making a purchase. I come, place an order for a Colin Stuart Cuffed Suede Over-the-knee Boot and it is not hard to figure out what the value of accomplishing that goal was. $149. [Not net profit, just value. We can compute profit et al later.]

But what is the economic (goal) value of requesting a catalog? Signing up for an Angel Card?

How about the economic (goal) value of me visiting VS All Access and consuming all the valuable content?

There is no doubt that ordering the catalog makes it more likely I'll buy more in the future. Signing up for the Angel Card will make me a loyal customer (after all, how will I ever resist the temptation of getting a surprise birthday gift every year!). Consuming the content at VS All Access improves my perception of the Victoria's Secret brand and perhaps even makes me a Net Promoter (something so precious to the company).

Yet how does an Analyst at VS value those micro-conversions?

And if she does not value any of these micro-conversions is she not doing a disservice to her organization by only having them focus on online conversions (remember just 2% for most sites) and not the holistic site value?

For websites I work with the economic value of micro-conversions is routinely 3 to 4 times the macro-conversion. Let that sink in. Stunning, right?

How about the Analyst for Ohio State University who does a great job of measuring online donations but not the value of campus tours scheduled, prospectuses downloaded, online applications, course registrations, job applications, etc., etc?

On Caterpillar's website there are no obvious macro-conversions, just a whole lot of micro-conversions to track as goals. Equipment lookups, lots of downloads, decision-making tools, quote requests for renting equipment, etc. How does the Analyst compute the value added by the site? Surely not using horrible metrics like Page Views, right?

You will only create a data-driven organization when you are able to compute the complete economic value created by the website. Not through data pukes.

So how does one identify economic (goal) value for the non-ecommerce macro-conversions and all the micro-conversions?

It is easy and it is hard.

You'll often need to step outside your silo of Google Analytics and WebTrends and Site Catalyst and CoreMetrics. You'll need to look in your corporate data warehouses. You'll need to work with your Finance team. You'll need to make leaps of faith.

Try these techniques. . .

#1: Assign campaign codes & track offsite converting goals (micro-conversions).

This is the easiest.

In the right navigation, you can meet one of my micro-conversions by clicking on my book's link. I track that click as a Goal (using Event Tracking). But what is the value of that click?

To answer that question I signed up for an affiliate account with Amazon and added my affiliate id to the outbound link. One great benefit: I get detailed reports from Amazon that tell me clicks and conversion rates! I know how much my book sells for and it's not that hard to compute value of every click on the book's link.

Same thing with the link to Market Motive, my startup that offers quarterly courses and certification in web analytics, paid search, etc. Rather than linking to www.marketmotive.com, the link has utm tracking parameters (utm_source=blogs &utm_medium=occamsrazor &utm_campaign=startuppromo).

Once a month, I go into the Market Motive GA account, segment the Visits from this blog as identified by the campaign tracking parameters, and look at the Per Visit Goal Value (how much economic value Occam's Razor readers added to MM by signing up for certifications, trials, watching videos, downloading stuff, etc). I use that as the Goal Value in this blog's Google Analytics settings.

Simple.

It is not unusual that in addition to delivering conversions (or not), your website links to other places where traffic you refer adds value. Whenever possible, tag those links with campaign parameters / affiliate codes / whatever works, and collect data that helps you identify goal values for your website.

Want a non-blog example?

Take a quick look at Tesco's website. You can see how easily you can use this simple tip to identify goal values for at least 10 not-on-the-corporate-site micro conversions (finally valuing tesco.com at an economic value it deserves!).

#2: Uniquely track online micro-conversions in offline systems.

Someone visits www.cat.com and submits a "Request A Quote" for a Backhoe and Industrial Loader. This goes into the CRM system for Caterpillar. Make sure it is marked uniquely as a "web_quote." Now wait 60 days. Look back and see how many of the web_quote marked requests converted into fully fledged purchases. Now do this:

Total revenue divided by number of web_quotes

You have the average goal value!

Of course you also know how many quotes were originally submitted and of those how many converted. You can use that going forward to get from Google Analytics the number of requests a day and apply the conversion rate and the goal value to compute economic value every day!

Go back and revise the goal value each month using the same method as above. It will help you, over many months, understand seasonality and whether your site is getting better quality quotes (increase in goal value) or worse quality (reduced goal value).

Not very hard. Just takes some time and patience.

Use the same method for people who ordered a Victoria's Secret catalog. Make sure they are identified uniquely in your company database, and then use their purchase behavior (as recorded in the database) to go back and enter a goal value into your web analytics tool.

Same thing for job applications received online (vs. those received from recruiters or via phone or people walking up). Compute conversion for online, identify costs saved due to non-payment of bounty, identify goal value!

Couple more examples. . . Tie applications submitted on the Burger King website to conversions offline, or coupons downloads on the Target website to the number, and value of, redeemed in-store.

Remember don't just take one number and stick with it forever. Periodically (at least once a quarter, though once a month is optimal) go back and validate you have the right number.

  

#3: Get the current "faith based" number from Finance.

Here's a simple example.

I can go to L'Oreal Paris and spend 10 minutes watching all the TV spots they are airing currently (and conveniently have on their website). Micro-conversions! Goal value?

Not as hard as you might imagine.

I walk over to the Finance department and ask them for the value of one TV ad impression. They have that number. That is what they use to allocate the TV budget (the $$$ spent by the GRPs for the ad, or another faith based number of how many people "possibly" watched the ad, used to computed $ per TV ad impression).

Use that number as your goal value. After all, someone came to the website willingly and watched your TV spot! You know that these people were not in the bathroom when your ad aired on TV. They were there on your site. They hit Play and Pause and Next!

[Use this exact method to place value on your YouTube video views.]

Another example.

How do you value the micro-conversion of me downloading the brochure of the GMC Acadia? The finance team is currently allocating budget to Marketing to spam half of the US with unasked for glossy brochures of the Acadia, in addition to putting millions of them in dealerships. That funding was allocated based on some smart Finance person cooking up some numbers that looked liked this: "When we send 2 million brochures of a car, typically we can get 20,000 people into the showroom, which yields 19,000 Acadias sold, so each brochure gets us a ROI of $45." There you just got the goal value for someone who comes to your site and proactively (with much stronger intent) downloads the brochure.

It is important to note I am not endorsing what the offline folks are doing nor how Finance currently computes the value of offline marketing activities. I am simply asking you to use what they are already using. You can improve upon things later (given that you have a lot more and better data).

Your newspaper ads, your TV blitzes, your billboards, your athletic sponsorships, your logos slapped on NASCAR cars, your conference sponsorships, your. . . other things are all currently being justified via, often faith-based, financial ROI models. Use the exact same numbers. And who will argue with you? You are using what everyone else is!!

People in Finance are your much underappreciated BFFs.

#4: Use "relative goal values." 

Sometimes the first three techniques are not an option for you. No worries.

We'll eyeball things! Because we MUST have goal values. Ok not really eyeball, rather we are going to try something clever.

Let's use ti.com as an example. Texas Instruments is a delightful company with amazing products. It is also a B2B company with no real online conversions, which makes our job in this context harder to do, and hence a great example.

I don't know anyone at TI or ti.com, so I'm making some assumptions. With a quick look at their website, we can identify that a good macro-conversion is orders for Samples. I want to get a Low Power Zero-Drift Instrumentation Amp, I go to the the page, I add a free sample to cart, and I checkout. Boom! Macro-conversion.

In order to establish a goal value for this macro-conversion, TI has many options. I would recommend using the one in tip #2 above.

That's done. Now you'll notice the site also has many micro-conversions. Let's just pick a few. Loads and loads of videos. Valuable "Selection Guides" (and other documents). New my.TI accounts. Completed designs. Outbound clicks to Authorized Distributors. There are others as well but let's just ignore those for a second.

Now how does one value these micro-conversions? If the first three techniques fail then my recommendation would be to use "relative goal values." That is, the value of one goal relative to another goal.

Our benchmark will be our macro conversion. Let's say it is $25 (it is probably a lot higher in real life, but stick with me).

So the question we'll ask is this: "How much is the download of a selection guide by a relevant visitor to our site worth relative to getting an order for a Sample?" Or "How much is someone watching an entire video for one of our products?" So on and so forth.

Don't do this yourself (especially if you are a Consultant and not an in-house Analyst). Get the decision makers in the room. Get Finance to join you. Get the Marketers to bring their wisdom. Essentially, people other than you who really know the business and have experience in making these kinds of judgment calls. They'll bring their baggage, but its a small price to pay.

The first output of this exercise will be a relative ranking of conversions. It might look something like this:

1. Sample orders
2. New my.TI new accounts
3. Completed designs
4. Videos watched
5. Selection guides and other downloads
6. Outbound clicks to distributors

Essentially a priority order of what's important to the business. (If you do nothing else with this info, treat this as Gold. It is so helpful in prioritizing your analytical efforts!)

Then you'll say: "So if a sample order is worth $25, then how much is a new my.TI account worth?"

(Before you jump and yell, let me rush to add that there are 10 good ways to answer that question. But remember, in this case we have no idea how to do it.)

The job of the collective intelligence in the room is to give you that number. An "our best estimate" or "closest judgment call" or "if you put a gun to our heads then based on our 10 year experience we would say x dollars."

Then you go to the next one. "If a sample order is worth $25, then what is the worth of a deeper connection with additional marketing potential and prospect address details and their future behavior on our website by creating a my.TI Account?" You get a number.

Then you continue, so on and so forth. Using the sample order as an anchor or relative anchors ("Well, if the video watched was worth $2 then a selection guide has got to be worth $5 [or $1, or whatever]").

You end up with something like this:

1. Sample orders. Goal value: $25
2. New my.TI new accounts. Goal value: $40
3. Completed designs. Goal value: $18
4. Videos watched. Goal value: $2
5. Selection guides and other downloads. Goal value: $5
6. Outbound clicks to distributors. Goal value: $5

Go put that in to your web analytics tool settings and compute economic value!

I know this is completely faith-based. I know that there are better ways of computing everything above. I know that you are doubtful. I hear you that a group of experienced people can't come up with something close to reality. Actually, you would be wrong about that last one.

I have done this many, many times and it is a surprise how often people say "OMG that was so close to what we had estimated before we did this expensive 9 month process with an outrageously expensive external consultant!"

Just try it. I just want you to start with something. Once the numbers start flowing you'll see that, almost as if by magic, you'll know some value of all that search traffic to a no-obvious-conversion B2B website or a non-profit or a Church's website or. You'll know the Per Visit Goal value of your Twitter and Facebook efforts. You'll know which content creates most value and which tools on the site suck. You'll know… so much.

And this is just the start. Once your execs get into the rhythm of this data and see its power and see your value (so IMPORTANT!), they'll give you the time and the resources to go compute the right goal values. That's the real outcome you want. But you don't get it by hounding people and trying to get perfection on day one without earning your chops. You get it by being nimble and getting key stakeholders involved and going with the "best we got" and building from there.

Trust me, it works.

#5: Use $1 as the goal value for all the outcomes. 

This is the worst case scenario. 

Nobody loves you. Nobody will talk to you. Nobody is interested in telling you anything.

You are the most unique business in the Universe. There is no possible way to get any vague idea of the site's worth. And you just got out of college.

Here's what you do.

First, identify all the macro and micro conversions. This is important. Can't skip this. If they won't help you then go to the site and identify them yourself. You might miss some, but that is okay.

Second, log into Google Analytics / Omniture / whatever and create the goals. Two seconds of work there. In the field that says Goal Value, proudly type in $1.

Hit save.

Start reporting the data with "Revenue," "Per Visit Goal Value" segmented by traffic source, "$index value" of the content, and so many more delightful things. More delightful than lame metrics like Total Visits and Average Page Views/Visit and Total Time on Site etc., etc.

The first time you do this people will be shocked. Then they'll ask "where the heck did you get that number?"

That is exactly what you want! 

For them to be impressed that you are not a lame reporter but someone who takes initiative and reports outcomes and value.

For them to get excited, or agitated, and ask you to explain.

You explain. Then you say, sweetly, blinking your eyes in a bewitching manner: "I took the best guess I could. Could you please help me come up with the best goal values?"

Boom!

You are in!

Sometimes they might say: "Take the $1 out, and report Time on Site." Do that. Start looking for another job.

99% of the time I have been asked: "Okay so how can I figure out the exact value." To which I say: "I read this blog called Occam's Razor, it is awesome. The author shared three specific techniques we can use. Let me tell you about them."

Boom!!

You got a promotion. : )

All from going with $1.

In all seriousness, using $1 is the last resort. But it is a great way to avoid waiting for Jesus or Krishna to come from heaven and give you the goal values. Just start the conversation. Start great reporting. Start doing some actual analysis.

Godspeed.

Ok, it's your turn now.

Do you compute goal values of all the micro-conversions (and if it applies, the macro-conversion) on your website? What approach do you take to quantify the economic value? Have you tried any of the above methods? Worked? Did not?

Please share your experience, hard knocks, love critique via comments below.

Thanks.

Excellent Analytics Tips #19: Identify Website Goal Values & Win! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

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10 Simple Tips To Get 250,000 Page Views Per Month

When we started our business 16 months ago we decided to use a blog as the central marketing tool for our business. We did it because we didn’t really have any money for advertising and we never really believed that attending networking events would work for us. We placed the blog at the center of our website and only had one commodity on our hands to make it a success….time.

It’s been a long journey but 16 months later we now get 250,000 pageviews to our site per month, in the last year we have brought in over $500,000 in business as a direct result of the blog and the business operates in 2 countries and our content has been picked up all over the world. We’ve largely used social media to promote the blog and grow that audience and today I wanted to share some of those tips with you and even though you might not have a business attached to your blog you’ll hopefully gain some good insights in to what works for business blogging….

1.Get some professional help at the start

We paid a small amount of money to get our blog designed by a professional at the start as well as getting somebody to add in the proper SEO plugins. Since then we haven’t really touched it design wise and have instead focused on the content. If you are serious about blogging or creating a business around your blog then you should invest a small amount of money at the start making it look professional.

2.Integrate Facebook wherever you can

Facebook is the most important social media tool we use in terms of bringing traffic to our site. It accounts for just over 18% of the traffic on our site and the 11,000 odd Facebook likes we have are people who come back to our site on a repeat basis to consume our content. Make it easy to share your content through Facebook and if the content is good enough it will spread like wildfire.

3.Forget about getting traffic from Twitter

Many people get obsessed with Twitter as a social media tool that drives traffic but let me save you lots of time and energy now because it simply does not. Less than 1% of our traffic comes from Twitter on a monthly basis despite some of our stories getting 100s of Retweets. You can certainly share the odd link through Twitter to gain some new readers but it is not the magic formula that you have been looking for.

4.The old blogging tricks still work best

Read many of the great posts on there or on any of the other great blogging advice sites and they’ll give you great advice like to make sure you add catchy titles (probably why you are reading this post in the first place), to write often and to guest post on other blogs. These are old pieces of advice but in a world where people are obsessed with social media and the new tools those are the tools that by far and away work the best. They are the easy wins.

5.Give everything away for free

As a business we sell advice on social media. We also do a very strange thing in that we give that advice away for free on the blog all the time. There is nothing in our heads that we keep for ourselves but instead focus on sharing as much of that knowledge as possible. By giving valuable advice away you make sure that people keep coming back to your blog for more advice and that’s how you build and audience. People are selfish, if they are coming to your blog they want something for free and that is what you will have to offer.

6.Be Social In The Real World

A huge amount of people who read our blog are people that we have met in the real world. Being social online is one thing but forging a social relationship with somebody in the real world is still far more powerful than anything. Try and attend conferences within your niche, meet people with similar interests and if relevant share your blog with them. If you are lucky enough to be able to speak at any events then work your blog in to the presentation and pitch yourself as the person of authority on your given subject.

7.Use rich media content if at all possible

Text is great and it’s an important part of blogging but not everybody is a good writer and even people who can write should try and support their content with rich media content if possible. I think it helps you stand out form the crowd. What do I mean by rich media content? Photos, videos, podcasts, diagrams, slidehows or presentations. The technology is there now for you to post most of these things for free and they’ll push your content out even further to new platforms.

8.RSS is still the dream subscriber

These days you’ll see plenty of ways to subscribe to blogs including email, Twitter and Facebook to name but a few but one stands head and shoulders above all the others for me and it’s the oldest one in the list…RSS. Getting an RSS subscriber is getting somebody who is totally committed to receiving your content every single day. I cherish RSS readers in a way that I would never think about Twitter followers or Facebook likes. The social subscribers are doing it as an impulse but an RSS reader is somebody who wants to get your content every single time you publish it instantly. You should take RSS subscribers over everything else in my opinion.

9.Build A passionate community around your blog

This is by far the hardest point on the whole list and there isn’t really any written rule on how to achieve it. The one thing I think you have to do most is be nice to everybody and reply to as many comments as you physically can. Comments on your blog, comments on Twitter, comments on Facebook or Youtube or wherever the person has left a comment. People fly through the web these days pausing for a second at a time on sites these days so if they are taking time to leave a comment oon your blog then the very least you can do is stop and answer them. Building community take a lot of time but you should never underestimate the power of word of mouth when it comes to your blog or business and a passionate community is just about the most powerful thing around today.

10.Never give people the hard sell through social media

Once you build a community or a large audience for your site the temptation is always there to try and sell to them or to push your products. We never ever write blog posts asking people to use our services. Make no mistake that they can find our services within one click if they are looking for them but we’ll never push them because people can smell the hard sell a mile away and they’ll never go for it and you’ll end up pushing them away instead. The idea with social media is to engage people and have a meaningful conversation with them. That is what works best in the long run.

About the Author: Niall Harbison founded Simply Zesty which is an agency that represents some of the biggest brands around and guides their strategy.

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